May 11, 2007

Interface21, the company that develops and supports Spring has announced that it has received $10 million in Series A financing from Benchmark Capital. The new funds will be used to accelerate product development and expand marketing, sales and support infrastructure to scale their professional open source offerings around Spring and related products.

March 5, 2007

The success of the software as a service application model has led to increased issues around integration, particularly across application platforms to enable SAAS services to be offered.

A clarification of SaaS is that it delivers service functionality within a hosted application environment. Users pay for the service which they can usually choose features to extend and/or turn off depending on their requirements. The biggest player in this space is of course salesforce.com with a reputed 600K plus paying users.

An interesting article on TheServerSide by Joseph Ottinger looks at some of these issues, in particular devoping adaptors, network security issues, SLA monitoring etc.

Much of the article seems to have been taken from an survey recently conducted by MuleSource, the ESB Open Source Product.

There are some interesting issues touched upon here, many of which we at Jana have come across ourselves in our consulting practice when helping out prospective SaaS vendors. They are well worth thinking about upfront when doing cross platform integration that is necessary for service offerings.

Another interesting part of the article is that MuleSource have now released a beta connector for Salesforce.com to faciliate some of this cross paltform integration between systems. This is definately something to keep an eye on. Mule is becoming more and more interesting as a core infrastructure component, and again proves the value that Open Source projects really do have.

November 27, 2006

It is fair to say that Open Source is on the verge, if not already, part of the software mainstream, so much so that even conservative IT organisations are investing in open source products and companies. It is no longer a free, substitute for mainstream software. It’s growing maturity means that it stand on its own feet and competes head-to-head with commercial offerings. Good product examples of this are OpeOffice by Sun Microsystems, and The Firefox Browser by Mozilla.

Initial take up of Open Source was limited by a number of factors, but the main one was the issue of accountability and reliability. Organisations and users feared that they would be left with unifinished or unsupported software. This has proved not to be the case with business models having sprung up around the support for free, enterprise quality software. Look no further than JBoss for a good example of this.

So what is Open Source ? It is best described as a set of principles and best practices wrapped around a methodlogy for the building and depoyment of software. A significant emphasis is placed on collaborative development rather than more development methodologies such as the waterfall method of development for example. The actual term “open source” was coined during a strategy session in Paulo Alto, California in 1998, at an event attended by Linus Torvalds, amongst others. Of course, open source, also infers that the software is essentially free to use, although the terms of commercial licenses can differ.

Here at Jana, we are a big fan of open source, and there are a variety of products we use and recommend that come under the umbrella of “open source”. Apart from the common LAMP product set (Linux, Apache, PHP & MySQL), we would urge you to check out SugarCRM and Zimbra, amongst others.

Whereas Open Source may seem a phenomenon right now, in the future it will become a normal part of how companies build and engage with software and software vendors.